Succulent-Smugglers Descend on California

Dudleya farinosa (stage name: Powdery Liveforever), a wild roseate plant with a spectacular yellow-flowered stalk, has become the It Plant for thieves.

Photograph by Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times / Getty

Succulents—drought-friendly, fireproof, angular, Zen—long ago attained the status of design cliché, a living version of the shag rug, Heath mug, Eames chair. But now a particular species, Dudleya farinosa (stage name: Powdery Liveforever), a wild roseate plant with silvery, pink-tipped leaves and a spectacular yellow-flowered stalk, which thrives on California’s coastal bluffs, has become the It Plant for succulent thieves. Last week, in Monterey County, two Dudleya poachers, a married couple, pleaded no contest to charges including felony grand theft and felony vandalism related to their removal of more than eighteen hundred plants from Garrapata State Park, in Big Sur. It was the fourth successful Dudleya prosecution in California in a little more than a year.

“I’d call it a poaching trend,” Captain Patrick Foy, of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me. The thefts, he said, are driven by emerging demand for Dudleya of all kinds in Asia, where a mature plant can command a price of as much as a hundred dollars. “There are people who book a flight from Korea or China, and they literally fly in, rent a car, stop by a moving store to buy huge numbers of boxes, and then drive up the coast.” Various species of Dudleya are found from Oregon to Mexico. “They harvest the plants, process everything in a hotel room, oftentimes, and ship them back to nurseries in Korea and China,” he said. According to the Guardian, “In Korea, raising succulents is considered an ‘addiction’ popular among housewives, students and others with small living spaces. Korean articles refer to the trend as ‘succulent fever’ and quote wives telling husbands who complain about oversized collections not to worry because ‘I will take all of my succulent plants with me when I leave you.’ ”

The problem came to light in late 2017, when a tipster in Mendocino County, thinking that she’d discovered an abalone poacher, called C.D.F.W. and inadvertently exposed a Dudleya-smuggler. Since then, Dudleya investigations have begun to consume California’s park wardens. In 2018, the California Fish and Game Commission named Adrian Kamada, a deputy district attorney in Humboldt County, its Prosecutor of the Year after he secured felony convictions for two Korean men and one Chinese man who stole twenty-three hundred Dudleya. (Their scheme began to unravel when local postal workers noticed soil spilling from packages bound for Asia.) Foy, who used to investigate illegal marijuana cultivation, told me that unlike drug dealers, who operate within large and highly stratified distribution systems, plant thieves often work as free agents. “With Dudleya, because an individual is able to do so much harvesting—and consequently so much damage—they don’t need a large network of middlemen,” he said. Up and down the coast, game wardens are on high alert for the telltale signs of poachers. “They’re staking out parking lots, looking for a car that’s out of place, or a person standing on the edge of a cliff,” Foy said. “If a person’s coming up the cliff and they’re dirty—like they’ve literally been digging in dirt—their backpack is full, and they’re throwing it in the back of their rental car. If they’re dropping people off, using lookouts, if they’re out at night, with ropes. Wildlife officers are very in tune with how to catch them.”

Debra Lee Baldwin, a garden photojournalist based in San Diego who for decades was a scout for Sunset magazine, bears some responsibility for the mainstream popularity of succulents. “I probably launched the whole movement,” she told me. In the early days, she said, “I had to do what I call drive-by shootings. I would go down streets in high-end neighborhoods with my camera and shoot succulents out the window. They were so hard to find.” No longer. Baldwin’s book, “Designing with Succulents,” from 2007, was the top-selling garden book on Amazon for nineteen weeks; the second edition came out last year. “What attracted the gardening public to succulents in the first place was largely the Echeverias, because they looked like roses, floral and symmetrical, and they’re not spiny or treacherous,” she said. “In a pot, they give you the look of floral arrangement, and they combine beautifully with flowers. Brides just launched this into the stratosphere.”

Dudleya are the wild cousins of the Echeveria. “These are very beautiful plants when they’re in full, plump, post-rain glory,” Baldwin said. “They look like a lotus, and some are this incredible white-silver, from the powdery coating on their leaves—the ‘farina,’ or pulverulence—that is a protective mechanism for the sun. You really shouldn’t touch ’em, ’cause you’ll leave a fingerprint that never goes away. It’s like touching a butterfly.” They are picky about their habitat, accustomed to hanging from cliffs, and spending much of the year parched. In the summer, she said, when Dudleya look peaked, “Nurturing garden types think, Ooh, needs water.” Don’t, unless you want a rotten plant; Dudleya drink only in winter. In nature, the mother plants use gravity to send their long stems downslope. As the stems wither, they remain attached to the mother, like umbilical cords, while the daughter plants nestle in rock niches far enough away not to compete with the mother for nutrients. “Just try to replicate that in your garden!” Baldwin said. “Dudleya can live in these very challenging conditions, and they want these challenging conditions. If you want to grow a Dudleya in a pot, you have to turn a pot on its side. When they start to look crappy, I look the other way. It’s sort of like a wild animal. You can tame it, you can have it in your home and enjoy it, but it’s never going to be as happy and integrated in your life as a pet.”

Enforcement is one way to combat smugglers, and the punishments doled out by California so far have been severe: tens of thousands of dollars in fines, visa revocation, jail time. Another way to fight smuggling is to destroy the market. That is the ambition of Kelly Griffin, a Dudleya specialist who works for Altman Plants, a nursery based in Southern California that is the country’s leading supplier of succulents. (They sell to Home Depot, Costco, and Lowe’s.) “I see myself as Johnny Cactuseed,” Griffin told me. “I’m the person that spreads cactus and succulents everywhere.” Griffin travels the world legally collecting plant material—pollen, seeds, and samples—from which he makes hybrid crosses and tissue-cultured clones, plants that people can enjoy without destroying sensitive habitats. He also stalks the Internet. A few years ago, he noticed rare and, he suspected, ill-gotten agaves being sold for thousands of dollars apiece on eBay. So he cloned thousands of them for nurseries where they sold for five dollars each. “I intentionally killed the market,” he said. “Being an activist, you can say, ‘That looks like a collected plant, and you shouldn’t be selling collected plants.’ ”

Griffin is working on Dudleya crosses now—hearty, cheap, plentifully available, domesticated varieties that he hopes will undermine the theft of the wild, rare, and irreplaceable native plants. The troubling irony of poaching these plants is that they only Liveforever in their natural habitats; plundered Dudleya are unlikely to survive the humid, hot environments where the thieves are sending them. “They’re being sold into a cycle of death,” Griffin said. “To take the plants is about as terrible a thing as you can do to an environment. When you take the mother plant, that DNA goes away from that environment forever.”

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.